


Wreck

by felsider (VSSAKJ)



Series: Eternal War: Birthrights [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Child Abuse, Explicit Language, Gen, Neglect, Self-Harm, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-15 04:37:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16926630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VSSAKJ/pseuds/felsider
Summary: His earliest scars are from overheard mutterings of “See now, Leonel is a good, useful child.” and “Not so worthless as that boy Solus.”





	Wreck

At the age of three, he runs carefree and oblivious, rarely within the gaze of the household maid assigned to his well being. He’s unaware of his parents’ decision to leave his life in the hands of others until he shows sign of some significant latent power; they consider themselves far too busy to attend the needs of a child.

He has already learned where he can push through the fence to go sprinting up and down the alleyway, taunting stray dogs with growls and barks of his own. When they respond he races back to the gap in the fence and dives through to avoid their wrath, heedless of the damage done to his clothes. Once he’s safely beyond their reach, he rounds and snarls back at their snapping teeth, fearless and confident.

On that day, his luck is sour—he mocks a dog smaller and nastier than usual, he stumbles on a crack in the paving stones that he fails to see. And suddenly he shrieks as the animal's teeth tear the skin from his knuckles and his blood dashes across the ground. He kicks out in panic and scrambles to his feet, holding the injury to his chest as he darts back into the safety of his yard. When he dares to glance behind him, he spies the dog's snapping jaws as it wiggles stubbornly through the gap, and he runs to the safety of indoors.

With the heavy door shut behind him, he examines the damage to his hand and feels tears start to roll down his face. There's so much blood, more than he's ever, ever seen. He wraps it in his already-soaked shirt, desperate to staunch the flow, but it keeps coming and coming, pooling to the floor around his feet, and he stumbles into the closest washing room. He forces the door shut behind him, fresh terrified tears flowing anew as he peels the material from his wound and finds it awash in fresh crimson. He fumbles at the lock on the door, his fingers slick with red, and washes.

 

He is only five years old when Leonel is adopted into their household. Before, he had known the absence of his parents; with his cousin’s arrival, he knows their unbridled contempt. His earliest scars are from overheard mutterings of “See now, Leonel is a good, useful child.” and “Not so worthless as that boy Solus.”

His mother is most smug about it. He hears her scoffing when she thinks herself out of earshot, calling Leonel's father a weak-willed fool without the rights to such a gifted child. She never goes so far as to be thankful for the accident that stole away Leonel's mother, but she comes close enough that Solus is uncomfortably confused.

His father is grateful, commenting that they're fortunate to have come by Leonel's potent skills. Now, he sighs with relief, they'll have a worthy heir. Solus does not know what ‘worthy’ is, only he is not it and never will be. He wonders when he lost his chance to demonstrate ‘worth’, the distant intangible concept of 'good enough'.

Having never known his parents' love, Solus cannot mourn its absence, but he stares down his bright, blond-haired cousin and wonders what makes the two of them so different.

 

He is seven, and Leonel is six, and they are inseparable. Solus is Leonel's silent shadow; wherever Leonel is ushered off to, he follows without question. His eyes are always focused, and he does not smile—his severity is far beyond his years. Leonel smiles, Leonel chatters gladly with their tutors, Leonel wins the heart of any who gaze upon him. Solus bares teeth like a wolf and speaks only when spoken to, a learned behaviour: he is spoken to rarely. His phrases are clipped and hoarse (Leonel is cheery and light).

They perform equally well in letters, numbers, and recitation. They are both smart, and both learn quickly, and they challenge one another by being so close in age. When it comes time to learn combat, they spar against one another. They are too young to choose their own weapons, some particular cut of steel or iron that they find favourable, but their combative mannerisms come to light quickly: Leonel is scolded for hesitating to commit to action, and Solus is chided for being relentlessly aggressive without a mind to defense. Their teacher remarks Solus will find himself gutted like a fish if he keeps on that way in a serious battle, and Leonel laughs, but Solus stares as if challenging the man to promise what he says is true.

 

By his ninth year, he has honed his resentment to a keen edge and uses it to defend himself against all comers, family and stranger alike. He will not suffer Leonel's presence any longer than he absolutely must, and he goes months without speaking to either of his parents.

He has listened to them, though: listened to them recite the rules they both must follow, he and Leonel, as though they are equals. He has listened to them speak around his presence, and he has listened to them lecture Leonel on the importance of loyalty, and he has listened to them preen and posture and flaunt. He has listened to them ignore him, and ground his teeth together on hurting confusion.

It’s the first year he fights with Leonel beyond children's tussling: he snaps at his cousin to shut up, and when Leonel does not, Solus attacks him, wild and rabid. He is punished without conviction; he hears his parents reminding Leonel not to allow Solus to sully him with such violence. It is the first night he drives a knife into his wrist, and he does not sleep, instead staying awake and muttering cursed hatred over the blood that's made him so strange and inhuman and worthless.

(If he did not bleed like this, he could have been the child they wanted. He could have been the favoured son.)

 

At eleven, he begins talking about the army. It's quiet muttering, and no one seems to hear him. To join the army is not an aspiration, but an expectation, especially of one without further prospects. Be they children of nobility, orphans, mercenaries, second third and fourth sons or daughters, the country is always in need of soldiers, and what's one more warm body to serve as low infantry from any other? He will die before year's end. There are always more to fill the ranks.

At night, he traces promises to himself into his wrists, and watches the blood ooze until he falls asleep. They do not want him, they do not need him, and they would not know if he was gone. As soon as the army will take him, he will leave. He will find a battlefield to die on, and he will be free.

When he wakes, he finds blood on the sheets, but he makes no effort to hide it—no one has ever mentioned it before now, and no one will. He wraps his wrists, ever-sensitive, with clean bandages, and settles his pair of vambraces in place above them. He has grown used to the quiet ache, and no one ever asks.

 

He has a growth spurt at thirteen, and his frame bulks wide. He has always been built for strength, and his years of picking fights have only encouraged his size. He does not go through a stage of lanky awkwardness that most teenagers do; instead he wakes one morning and finds himself a young man.

 

He is fifteen when he finally leaves. He looks older, though, and no one questions his sharp glare, ripe with black hatred. The bag slung over his broad shoulders feels weightless; it is nothing to what he leaves behind. He does not once look back, knowing both his parents and Leonel will never deign to look for him. He will vanish into the war like countless other unwanted invisible faces—he will be no one there, not the failed firstborn of weather-masters nor the cousin of a gifted successor. He will be nothing more than a useless foot soldier, armed with a great broadsword and no interest in defending himself, and he will die.

It's long past dark when he reaches the recruitment centre, and the door is bolted shut. He expected nothing different; he lowers his bag to the ground, hunkers down in the doorway, draws his knees to his chest, and waits. It's too dangerous to open his wrists this night. He wants, oh, he wants to find freedom from his damned blood through this door, and he wants to find it in more ways than he can even count. He wants all his strength available to him in the morning, to better prove himself capable of dying on the battlefield. They will want him fresh, and whole, and powerful, and he will be all those things. Still his fingers twitch towards the pocket wherein rests his set of small, fine blades, and he wants, oh, he wants.

 

He is both well-known and unknown by the time he is seventeen, and he relishes it. The other men and women in his company have learned the important things about him: not to touch him and not to speak to him. They happily ignore him, and he them. The only one he has any time for is their captain, and that is because the man expects nothing from him but bloodthirst—that, Solus gives without restraint. He is wild violence on the field, hewing and hacking and always emerging drenched in red. Around the cookfires in the evening, they murmur that he is not human, that he is some kind of monster. They have no idea, and Solus glares silent scathing rebuke on their lack of knowledge. They edge further from him and continue their whispering.

When the rest of the camp is sleeping and he has volunteered again for the least appealing of late-night watches, he stares into the inky darkness with blood dripping between his ankles and wonders if this is 'happiness', or 'freedom'. He wonders, too, what those words even mean.

 

Well into his nineteenth year, and some six months after the incident, furious hatred is still the only emotion he knows; he eats, sleeps, wakes, breathes nothing else. They stole his death from him. The fucking man and woman who brought him into this world and saw fit to ignore his very existence all this time. In his moment, at his time, they finally chose to step in. To acknowledge him, over eighteen years too damn late.

The healers had said his wounds were too many and too complex to heal without magic, and why waste magic on a common foot soldier—he could be replaced. They wondered quietly aloud after the amount of blood he expelled, and spoke softly behind their hands, and he would have torn the flesh from his exposed bones if he thought it would hurry his end along. If he could have moved beyond the agony.

And his mother, his damned fucking cold-blooded bitch of a mother, had swept forward with name and power and rank behind her and demanded he receive the best possible treatment. She'd promised, he heard later, to personally execute for treason any healer who failed to use every skill at their disposal to heal him. And they hadn't even allowed him time to wonder after their debilitating change of heart.

“No son of our line,” Solus heard her say when they both thought him unconscious, her voice quivering with emotion, “Will shame us further by dying in the field without any recognition. It's the least he could do, being what he is.”

His father replied thoughtfully, and Solus felt the weight of the man's gaze even with his eyes closed, “The only thing worse would be word getting out of Leonel's killing your sister when he was young. People would doubt our strength, our discipline, our capacity. Solus has been failure enough already. We couldn't recover any more damage.”

When silence settles again around him, he grinds his teeth and flexes wrists aching to bleed. He cannot hate Leonel so much that evening—Leonel, who knows nothing of either of his parents—but he can hate all that he is, and all that his idiot fucking parents have done. When he finally drifts into fitful sleep, his last resentful though is that somehow, he hasn't even been _nothing_ well enough to earn their acceptance.

 

And at twenty-one, he is a commander. He has no forgiveness, and he has forgotten nothing. He rides straight-backed at the head of a troop of scouts, all of whom fear or resent him or both. He speaks rarely, only to pique others. He has never wanted this, and never asked for this. His teeth should be ground to dust; he should be dead.

And the morning Leonel rides in to join the company, he spits curses of helpless, always helpless, fury.

**Author's Note:**

> In his canon, Solus is a wanted fugitive, suspected of murdering the King. His relationship with Leonel remains complicated.


End file.
